Family wages: The roles of wives and mothers in U.S. working-class survival strategies, 1880–1930

Abstract

The common image of a female wage earner in the U.S. in the decades around the turn of the 20^th century is that of a young, single woman: the daughter of her family. However, the wives and mothers of these families also made important economic contributions to their families' economies. This paper argues that we need to rethink our evaluation of the economic roles played by ever-married women in working-class families. Using a range of government reports as well as IPUMS, I document three ways in which working-class wives and mothers strove to bring cash into their family units: through formal workforce participation; through home work of various sorts; and through selling subsistence, providing in-home services to nonfamily members in exchange for cash. Unlike earlier works which focused on single locations or ethnic or racial groups or female occupations, I tell a national story of ever-married women's cash-producing work. Working-class wives and mothers filled in the economic gaps existing in the interactions of their families with the capitalist marketplace through a range of different methods. While early 20^th-century unions called for the establishment of a “living wage” for male workers, the world in which those workers lived required both family wages and family strategies to bring in other forms of cash for their survival.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to many people for their assistance with this paper. The ILR School women's writing group has read more versions of this paper than anyone else; they have only made it better. Rhonda Clouse helped with final technical changes and ILR students Ayala Falk, Nick Harper and Seth Popick all assisted with the research. I first began to look more closely at married women's economic contributions after Nick Salvatore asked me, “What are all those married women doing in your stories?” after I gave a paper based on the research for United Apart. Diane Feldman and Sara DeVault-Feldman always earn my gratitude.

Notes

^1. The New York Times, March 27, 1911, p. 4; Stein, The Triangle Fire, p. 103. Information on Salvatore Maltese from the U.S. Census, 1910, New York county, NY, E.D. 58, p. 603, Sheet 7B.

^2. Stein, The Triangle Fire, p. 204.

^3. “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers,” S.S. Italia, from Palermo, Italy, May, 1906, p. 53, line 17 (http://search.ancestrylibrary.com/Browse/view.aspx?dbid = 7488&path = 1906.05.19.Italia.33); “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers,” S.S. Francesca, from Palermo, Italy, July, 1907, p. 72, lines 18–23 (http://search.ancestrylibrary.com/Browse/view.aspx?dbid = 7488&path = 1907.08.03.Francesca.68).

^4. U.S. Census, 1910, Manhattan Ward 17, New York, New York, ED 897, p. 11A.

^5. See, for example, Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl; Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom; and Bodnar, et al., Lives of Their Own.

^6. Good examples of this come from , in both her book Men, Women, and Work and her later work, Constant Turmoil, as well as in DeVault, United Apart and Turbin, Working Women of Collar City.

^7. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations.

^8. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, p. 76.

^9. I am currently working on a paper investigating why the Census Bureau changed the way that they reported women workers' marital status in their publications.

^10. The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) has been created from the manuscript census records. Since the 1890 manuscript census was destroyed in a fire, this is impossible for that year. Therefore, I have used the published records of the 1890 census to fill that year in as often as possible. Because the 1890 census reported marital status and employment for those aged 10 and over, I used their age limits for my own IPUMS-created tables, as well. Ruggles, et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series [Hereafter cited as Ruggles, IPUMS].

^11. Benson, Household Accounts; May, “The Historical Problem of the Family Wage.”

^12. Glickman, A Living Wage.

^13. See, for example, Tentler's use of such sources in Wage-Earning Women, p. 73 passim. The most well-known of these sources is probably Dorothy Richardson's The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl as Told by Herself (reprinted in O'Neill, ed., Women at Work, though Van Vorst and Van Vorst's volume, The Woman Who Toils is also often cited. Both Enstad (in Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure) and Kathy Lee Peiss, (in Cheap Amusements) use some similar sources but to very different ends. Both, however, focus almost exclusively on young, single women and their social goals and desires, including marriage.

^14. Manning, The Immigrant Woman, p. 14.

^15. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, p. 476.

^16. US Census, 1900, Alamance county, NC, E.D. 6, p. 105A.

^17. Hall et al., Like a Family, p. 103; Janiewski, “Southern Honor, Southern Dishonor: Managerial Ideology and the Construction of Gender, Race, and Class Relations in Southern Industry,” p. 78. Confederate pensions paid very little and few Southern states offered any type of “mother's pensions.” See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, pp. 135 and 424.

^18. Hill, Marriage and Divorce 1887–1906 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1908), p. 12.

^19. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 1: “Cotton Textile Industry,” Table XXXI, pp. 1016–31; Vol. 2: “Men's Ready-Made Clothing,” Table XXVIII, pp. 836–959; Vol. 3: “Glass Industry,” Table XXIX, pp. 942–955; Vol. 4: “Silk Industry,” Table XXIX, pp. 574–83.

^20. Steven Ruggles includes all women “with spouse absent” in the category “separated” in his article, “The Rise of Divorce and Separation in the United States,” p. 457.

^21. Peck, Reinventing Free Labor.

^22. From an IPUMS on-line data analysis of labor force status by marital status, controlled by sex and filtered by birthplace. See note 26, below.

^23. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 1: “Cotton Textile Industry,” Table XXXI, pp. 1016–31; Vol. 2: “men's Ready-Made Clothing,” Table XXVIII, pp. 836–959; Vol. 3: “Glass Industry,” Table XXIX, pp. 942–955; Vol. 4: “Silk Industry,” Table XXIX, pp. 574–83.

^24. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, p. 76.

^25. U.S. Census, 1900, Alamance county, NC, E.D. 6, p. 123A.

^26. My use of IPUMS here is circumscribed. I began to investigate it as a source when I discovered the discrepancy in the published census reports and Hill's analysis. The IPUMS website offers a limited online data analysis (ODA) tool. This ODA allows the manipulation of only four variable in order to produce cross-tabulations: a row variable, a column variable, a control variable, and a “filter.” This enabled me to run the tables (Tables 1 & 2) for labor force status by marital status controlled by sex for specific ages (10–80; see note 10, above). I could use ODA to run to run tables on race and nativity by replacing the age variable with the labor force variable and race or nativity for labor force. I could not run, however, the tables necessary to produce Table 3, which is why that table comes from Carter, et al., Historical Statistics of the United States, which uses IPUMS in a much more sophisticated manner.

^27. U.S. Census, 1900, Forsyth county, NC, E.D. 37, p. 269A.

^28. Taken from a dataset of all tobacco workers in Winston, N.C., created from the 1900 Manuscript Census. See DeVault, United Apart, Appendix 2, pp. 231–236, for description of dataset creation process.

^29. U.S. Census, 1900, Forsyth county, NC, E.D. 37, pp. 268B–270B.

^30. Mary Anderson, Family Status of Breadwinning Women in Four Selected Cities, p. 29.

^31. Pidgeon, Slaughtering and Meat Packing, p. 129.

^32. Bose, Women in 1900, pp. 204–5.

^33. Quoted in Benson, Household Accounts, p. 36.

^34. See, for example, Margo J. Anderson, The American Census, Chapters 4 and 5, pp. 83–130.

^35. Mary Anderson, Family Status…in Four Selected Cities, pp. 26–27.

^36. Mary Anderson, Family Status…in Four Selected Cities, p. 30.

^37. The one exception was a widowed 28-year-old woman employed as a “waiter [sic] in hotel.” U.S. Census, 1900, Forsyth county, NC, E.D. 37, p. 270A.

^38. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 3: “Glass Industry,” pp. 179–80.

^39. From a series of IPUMS tables showing the distribution of women in the workforce by marital status and race for 1880 and 1900–1930. Ruggles, IPUMS.

^40. Manning, The Immigrant Woman, p. 14.

^41. See Manning, The Immigrant Woman, pp. 14–17, and Pidgeon, Slaughtering and Meat Packing, pp. 118–120.

^42. Dinnerstein, et al., Natives and Strangers, Table 5.1, p. 123.

^43. From a series of IPUMS tables showing the distribution of women in the workforce by marital status and nativity for 1880 and 1900–1930. Ruggles, IPUMS.

^44. See, for example, Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl; Hewitt, Southern Discomfort; Lamphere, From Working Daughters to Working Mothers; Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time; Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community; Caroline Waldron Merithew, “Anarchist Motherhood: Toward the Making of a Revolutionary Proletariat in Illinois Coal Towns,” pp. 217–246, and Jennifer Guglielmo, “Italian Women's Proletarian Feminism in the New York City Garment Trades, 1890s–1940s,” pp. 247–298, both in Gabaccia and Iacovetta, Women, Gender and Transnational Lives, among many others.

^45. Benson, Household Accounts, p. 7.

^48. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 2: “Men's Ready-Made Clothing,” p. 384.

^46. Pidgeon, Slaughtering and Meat Packing, p. 127.

^47. From table in U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 2: “Men's Ready-Made Clothing,” p. 383.

^49. U.S. Census, 1900, Borough of Manhattan, New York county, New York, E.D. 759, Sheet 17, p. 202B.

^50. New York World, 7/10/1900, p. 7.

^51. See DeVault, United Apart, pp. 26–34, for the story of this strike.

^52. U.S. Census, 1910, Borough of Manhattan, New York, New York, E.D. 1023, p. 6A; U.S. Census, 1920, New York, New York, E.D. 1115, p. 13A; U.S. Census, 1920, Huntington, Suffolk county, New York, E.D. 107, p. 12B. By 1930, Otto Kohout had become a pharmacist in Huntington, N.Y. (U.S. Census, 1930, Huntington, Suffolk county, New York, E.D. 52–60, p. 8A.)

^53. Schneider, Trade Unions and Community, pp. 63–64.

^54. See Boris, Home to Work, pp. 93–94. The Library of Congress's collection of Lewis Hine photos taken for the National Child Labor Committee reveals 181 photos of mothers and children involved in “home labor” of many different types. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgibin/query/d?nclc:0:./temp/ ∼ pp_hVAy: (Accessed 1/27/2010)

^55. See Boris, Home to Work. Even Bose could not find a way to estimate this (see Bose, Women in 1900, p. 39).

^56. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 2: “Men's Ready-Made Clothing,” p. 35. This volume investigated the men's clothing industry in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York city, and Rochester, N.Y.

^57. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 2: “Men's Ready-Made Clothing,” pp. 139, 239, 240.

^58. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 2: “Men's Ready-Made Clothing,” p. 240.

^59. See U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 2: “Men's Ready-Made Clothing,”p. 230–231; and Lewis Hine photos cited above.

^60. U.S. Census, 1900, Lewistown, Maine, E.D. 23, Sheet 7B. Surname may be Lauckshas; handwriting very hard to decipher. The 1920 Census lists Dominic and Barbara Loukshes living with their daughter Annie's family in Lowell, Massachusetts. (U.S. Census, 1920, Lowell, Mass., E.D. 213, Sheet 18A.) The family's 1900 boarders include one married couple, both employed, and two married men without wives present.

^61. See, for example, Bell, Out of This Furnace.

^62. Mary Anderson, Family Status…in Four Selected Cities, pp. 5–6, 33, 66, 94, 129.

^63. DuBois, quoted in Jones, Labor of Love, p. 114; U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States , Vol. 16: “Family Budgets of Typical Cotton-Mill Workers,” pp. 61, 70, 86, 109, 123, 199.

^64. See, for example, the Laurent Family in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1930. U.S. Census, 1930, Fall River, Mass., E.D. 3–64, p. 15B.

^65. Mary Anderson, Family Status…in Four Selected Cities, p. 5.

^66. Mary Anderson, Family Status…in Four Selected Cities, pp. 31, 35.

^67. Mary Anderson, The Family Status of Breadwinning Women.

^68. Mary Anderson, Family Status…in Four Selected Cities.

^69. Mary Anderson, Family Status…in Four Selected Cities: Jacksonville, 71.2%, p. 29; Wilkes-Barre, 30.9%, p. 61; Butte, 48.9%, p. 90; Passaic, 49.2%, p. 125.

^70. Bose, Women in 1900, Ch. 1, pp. 22–54, generally; figures on p. 40.

^71. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 1: “Cotton Textile Industry,” Table XXXI, pp. 1016–31; Vol. 2: “Men's Ready-Made Clothing,” Table XXVIII, pp. 836–959; Vol. 3: “Glass Industry,” Table XXIX, pp. 942–955; Vol. 4: “Silk Industry,” Table XXIX, pp. 574–83. For cotton textiles, the “Northeast” includes Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, while the “southeast” includes Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. For glass, “Northeast” includes New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; “southeast” West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia; the “Midwest” includes Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Silk textiles were located in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

^72. Just as the lowest income in Table 6 came from the Southeastern region for the glass industry, so does the lowest percentage of family's income. This is probably due to the presence of black women in the southern glass industry.

^73. See Glenn, Forced to Care, p. 24. Also see U.S. Bureau of Labor, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, Vol. 16, “Family Budgets of Typical Cotton-Mill Workers” and other collections of “family budgets” by government agencies.

^74. Folbre, “The Unproductive Housewife.”